Why Investors Keep Saying No (And What to Do About It) | Justin Wastnage from Vloggi

0:00 Alan Jones: At the core of everything that Logy does is transforming everyday video, and by everyday video I basically mean mobile phone footage, into trusted, structured, owned assets for business organizations. And so what we see is video as content is everyday sort of business, video as data is replacing checklists, and that's in that sort of converting anything you can see and hear into data. That's the mid-market. And then video as evidence is really the market we really want to move into because that's the very high compliance, very high security area.

0:38 Speaker B: Welcome to Pick My Brain, the podcast where we help startup founders improve their pitches to better connect with customers, co-founders, and investors. My name's Alan Jones, and I'm an ex-startup founder myself, but that was a long time ago. Now I'm an angel investor with literally a decade, sadly, of experience helping new businesses find their footing and achieve their goals. But first, I'd like to acknowledge that this podcast is being recorded on Gadigal land, land that was never ceded. I pay my respects to their innovators and leaders past, present, and emerging. On Pick My Brain, you'll hear the real story straight from founders as they pitch their startups and tackle the challenges we all face and try to turn their ideas into a successful business. Each episode, we'll see if I can help these founders take their startups another step forward with some advice, some ideas, and maybe a little constructive criticism. Thanks for joining me. Let's get started.

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2:26 Speaker B: Today's episode, we're joined by Justin Wessnake, the founder and CEO of Vloggi. That's V-L-O-G-G-I.com. And Justin, I've just realized that I'm not actually entirely sure how to pronounce your surname. Name, even though we've known each other for a few years. Can you run me through it?

2:43 Alan Jones: Yeah, Wastonage.

2:44 Speaker B: Wastonage.

2:45 Alan Jones: Or Wastonage, depending on your accent. Look, I don't get hung up about it at all.

2:50 Speaker B: Is it a village? Is it a hamlet? Is it a town? Is it a river? Where does that surname come from?

2:55 Alan Jones: Well, funnily enough, it's from a town in France called Gatiney, which was in Normandy. And the royal family or the noble family from Gatiney went to England and they were the du Gatiney. And then over the years, the de was dropped and then the spelling changed. And interestingly enough, there was only one family with the name in Australia, but then John Wasnich, who's actually in the startup scene as well, moved to Australia recently, and I caught up with him at the Startup Hub. Yeah, so now there's two of us, both in the startup sector.

3:29 Speaker B: That's an amazing coincidence, that's amazing. So was this like, you know, the Norman Conquest? Do you have Frankish blood?

3:36 Alan Jones: Yep, correct. Yeah, so it's, no, it's Viking. So, you know, the Vikings went to Normandy, settled it, and then the Normans went to England and settled that. And yep, and in fact, did a DNA test not long ago or during COVID and basically our family haven't moved out of the southeast of England for 1,000 years.

4:00 Speaker B: Well done on being the first. Well done on being the first. Mate, I can already sense listeners and watchers tuning out while we're No doubt on British history. But there's always two questions at the beginning of the episode that I like to ask the founders that come on the show, just to give everybody a sense for who we're talking today, where they've come from. So what's your origin story? When you were a kid, what did you think you wanted to be when you grew up?

4:23 Alan Jones: Well, actually I wanted to be a radio presenter or a sort of, I'm a big fan of British panel shows. So really for me, that was the ultimate goal was could you be one of those comedians who sort of thinks on their feet and tells funny stories And as a backup plan was a radio journalist and then, you know, and TV and radio. So it was always, that was always kind of what I kind of wanted to do, but that didn't quite pan out, so.

4:52 Speaker B: That's a pretty tough gig, I can say, as a pretty ordinary run-of-the-mill podcaster. It's pretty hard to think on your feet and keep an audience entertained and also give some informational value. It's a tough gig. Mate, you're still in media today, but the world of media has come a long way since we were young. Tell us a bit more about Floggy, its origins and where it's gone and where it is today. Give me your pitch, basically.

5:21 Alan Jones: Yeah, so essentially at the core of everything that Floggy does is transforming everyday video, and by everyday video, I basically mean mobile phone footage, into trusted, structured, owned assets for business organizations. Now, at the very basic level, that is video as content. So to give you an example, this week we're being used by Major League Baseball, and Netflix in the US to crowdsource a commercial around everyone singing "Take Me Home to the Ballgame." And for that, you know, Netflix's lawyers crawled all over our terms and conditions and so forth. But that's an example of where they need video just as pure as content, but they need to legally own the rights. So that's kind of what we've been doing for sort of 5 years. And then about a year or so ago, we really got approached by companies needing video as evidence. And for that, we kind of, that's a more industrial setting. So essentially anywhere where workers need to collect data, checklists, or anywhere where basically they can walk and talk and describe a problem and film at the same time is where we come in. So we kind of, and basically they, those companies are much higher up the value chain. So what we see is video as content is our everyday sort of business. Video as data is replacing checklists and that's in that sort of, converting anything you can see and hear into data. That's the mid-market. And then video as evidence is really the market we really want to move into, 'cause that's the very high compliance, very high security area. We're talking to a very large organization for whom security and safety of the data is absolutely paramount. And that's where the really high-value stuff comes in.

7:12 Speaker B: What's broken with the way most video gets uploaded? So let's say, for instance, we're, crowdsourcing video from Major League Baseball fans and they're all singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. What's broken with the current popular ways to upload and source that content?

7:33 Alan Jones: Well, I'll tell you, about 6 months ago, something really changed, which was Sora. So basically with synthetic AI video, this has really propelled a lot of large corporates to come and talk to us because there's 4 things converging at once. One is the rise of synthetic video. It is very easy now to fake video that looks almost as good, and in 2 weeks' time or a month's time, it will look as good. So this rise of synthetic media is one. Rise of another trend though is Generation Z workers expect to be able to record stuff on their phone and narrate. So we've had lots of large—

8:14 Speaker B: Yeah.

8:15 Alan Jones: Organizations in the construction space saying that they had unsecure WhatsApp groups, you know, reporting faults and that kind of stuff. So workers, especially younger workers, are already using video, narrated video as an input source, but at the moment that is unsecure. So that's the sort of the third thing is it's unsecure and it's unstructured. So typically if you are collecting video from a variety of sources, be they employees or the general public. All the videos come in and they sit in a cloud file and they're essentially unusable. They're unusable until they're verified and until you have the rights to use them. So, in the use case you were talking about, the crowdsourcing, there used to be a lot of going back and forth, getting model releases, getting— Yeah. Content assignment forms from those. That's kind of what we've had built into our system for 5 years. And what we are laying on top now is those industrial use cases where it's employees shooting the videos rather than members of the public.

9:23 Speaker B: So just want to get the sense that the business has changed over time, pivoted a few times as we say in startup land. Where did, where did Vlogee originally begin and what were the market signals you got from customers or from investors that Do you need it to find a better product customer fit?

9:40 Alan Jones: The question that I think you were about to ask was what did I do before startup?

9:45 Speaker B: Sorry, we launched right into it, didn't we?

9:47 Alan Jones: But however, the two are linked, right? So I was working, I had, I started my career actually as a, in a tech startup in London in the video space and then moved, worked for Microsoft, again pioneered video public relations and then worked in publishing. For trade publications and pioneered things like videos from trade shows. The video was always there. And then immediately before starting this, I was actually working in the tourism sector in lobbying, decided to go out on my own. And all of my clients then were tourism boards. They all had the same problem. They needed massive amounts of video shot on location. They couldn't pay people to create it. So that's when I came up with the idea of, oh, well, 'Well, if only people, everybody has a phone, so can we make a way that video can get from someone's phone into legally the hands of tourism organizations, we can solve this problem.' And that's really where the genesis came from. And the problem was is that we raised money, we built this, the minimal viable product, and we had customers, South Australian Tourism Commission paying customer, Tourism Victoria, all of these signed contracts And then COVID, you know, so that was basically pivot one was suddenly the whole travel and tourism industry that the initial product was built around collapsed. So then we sort of, we raised some money to retool it towards marketing and that's where we really invested that time in. And Jack's Tires and Auto were the first customer who really insisted on this, was that mechanism by which you transfer the ownership rights from the contributor over to the corporate. So that was kind of our biggest pivot. And then we built that and basically since then, so we've basically only been customer funded. So any features we've done have been customer funded. So some of those, so how we've responded to customers there, for example, Google, Google Ads was a customer. They paid for us to build a whole feature set around video surveys. So question 1 of 2, question 2 of 2, so forth. We have the New South Wales government as a customer and they, they need something particular in the way that those submissions are categorized and archived. So essentially, we've been really focusing for the 3 years since we built that sort of, since we pivoted then into really just improving all the focus, all the features for video as content. And then about a year ago, we started rebuilding this video as data engine. So what that really meant was that we had to to build the backend from scratch, to be knowing that the customers that are gonna use that much more sensitive around data privacy, data security. So we've rebuilt it to be completely white label and deployable. And I guess that kind of gives us two things. It means that we can use resellers to actually target specific verticals. And it also means that we can actually serve those highest compliance enterprise customers with their own deployment. Mm-hmm. Of our system.

12:58 Speaker B: Gotcha, gotcha. So all the way along here you've been bootstrapping, funding the growth of the business out of cash flow. How big is the team? You've mentioned we a couple of times. Who is Vloki?

13:13 Alan Jones: Look, it has been as big as 7 people, but it's currently 4 of us, but 2 of us stay today and then contractors and so forth.

13:24 Speaker B: Any external investors so far?

13:25 Alan Jones: Not for 4 years. So we did raise money, we raised a small friends and family round in 2019 in order to build the MVP. And then we went back to those same investors in 2021 to build the MMP, the minimal marketable product. We are out again. We have some large enterprise deals on the horizon., and we actually need to get to a certain level to even be able to satisfy those customers. So we currently have a safe round open, only it's not something that's already been invested. We're trying to raise $800,000 in order just to really bring this enterprise product to the market and to satisfy some of the things like the US presence. To be frank, you know, the product that we have at the moment, even video as content, could easily based on benchmarks of similar products, be a million-dollar ARR product with very little effort because all the marketing funnels there, the product exists, so forth. And then we have this other opportunity to actually take it to much, much larger customers. But some of that, we need some money just to actually do it. So in the perfect world, you'd raise sort of $7 or $8 million. But this being Australia and money's not easy to come by, we've set our sights lower just to do the minimum required really to build those foundations to scale the business, both video as content and video as data.

14:53 Speaker B: Gotcha. Great. The team's grown and shrunk a few times. Tell me about the, how you've built the platform. What's the platform built in? How has that changed?

15:05 Alan Jones: So I built the prototype, which essentially was just hacking Typeform. And the irony of that is that Typeform last year bought a company called VideoAsk out of Spain. For $32 million, and they had essentially done the same hack that I did kind of 5 years ago.

15:21 Speaker B: Boom.

15:22 Alan Jones: So that was the kind of, that was the prototype. And on the back of that, we got the South Australian government to give us a contract, and we proved that you could actually collect video and edit it without ever having to go to a location. And then when we actually raised some money to build an MVP, we actually hired a very talented video engineer who actually holds the patent for the first streaming of mobile video over 3G, I think. And he built the backend and the proprietary encoder flow that we are actually still using today, right? So at the very kernel of what we have currently is a C++ and FFmpeg encoder flow that does a whole lot of sort of magic. And we built around, the original platform was built in PHP, which saw me staying up late at night with a book, PHP for Dummies, breaking the code. And then when we turned it into a minimal market product, we rebuilt it all in Node.js and React frontends. And then JC, Jean-Christophe, has spent the best part of a year actually rebuilding it again, completely MCP, which I know has a question mark over it now, but replacing All the APIs with, with MTP. The reason for that is because at the heart of the analysis part, so if you're gonna convert video into data, you don't know what data the customer wants. So it, it's completely modular so that, sure, everyone wants speech-to-text, everyone wants object recognition, but do they also want audio signature? Do they also want optical character recognition? There's over 1,000 AI models out there. There, our system will be able to accept any of them. And rather than it being API calls that have to be updated, the idea is that all of those connections are now MTP, which means that it should, in theory, be able to accept any AI model.

17:25 Speaker B: At a high-level, non-technical user, you know, VC investor level, how do you verify that— the video that's been uploaded isn't synthetic, is authentic?

17:41 Alan Jones: Yeah, so there's a few ways of doing it. The simplest way though is by recording the device data. So essentially in our projects, you have 3 ways of uploading video. One is through the camera, another one is uploading a file or allowing a third party to upload a file. Now, uploading a video from a device is obviously the most secure and you get the actual device data and that's recorded, that's hashed in a log. And then you can also run some other analysis over it like the length and duration, the pixel depth, the metadata analysis. So you can get to a level where you can get to a 99% accuracy that it is human-generated. But more importantly, you also have a log of every change that's made to that video, which means that the original video is stored and then any changes the company makes are then logged in a chain of custody, which means that legally, even if somebody were to upload a fake video, you have evidence of that. So first of all, it would actually be quite, it's actually quite hard to upload a fake video from a device camera because our system takes over the camera. That's hard but not impossible to hack if you really were that way inclined. But every device has a unique MAC address and an IMEI number. So there's ways of actually, triangulating that. If somebody really wanted to, they probably could, but in 99% of cases, that's fine. In actual fact, during the US presidential election, we were used by Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, and when they contacted us, they said, at that time, they were still up against Trump, and their campaign reached out to us and said, we know that their campaign, a lot of their videos are created in St. Petersburg in a bot farm. We really need to have faith that the answers that we're getting from potential voters are real videos. So they basically did that by disabling uploading videos and only allowing videos to be recorded on people's devices.

19:55 Speaker B: Are clients typically signing up on a per-project basis, or are they signing up for an annual license to a particular iteration of the product or a particular set of features? How does the commercial work?

20:18 Alan Jones: Yeah, so we actually haven't launched yet the, the industrial compliance version. So at the moment everyone's coming through one funnel, which is still quite heavily focused on video as content. And one of the drivers, as per your question earlier about the pivot, one of our drivers towards video as data was too much of the flow at the moment is per campaign. As soon as this video is content, then there is a need for it and there's an end date. So we need, we really needed to find a way to get companies to use it more and more every day. Our driving metrics are out from North Star metric is number of videos processed and number of processes applied to those videos. So we really want companies to use it every day with hundreds of employees, if not thousands, and for them to apply lots of video processes to that. So what I mean by is analysis. So not just to encode and watermark and to speech to text the video, but also to extract object recognition, also to extract audio signature, also to extract, because every time they do that, that's an API call and that's a much higher value for us. Yeah., but it's also a higher value for them. So essentially, kind of what we're raising money for is to really take that more valuable use case to market because the other one is already in market and that just needs acceleration. But that second use case, we will probably need to work with industry specialists. So for example, we have clients in that pipeline in the chemical inspection area. And they have a slightly different workflow. They have the same inputs. The input will always be everyday video, so mobile phone footage. But what they're looking for in that use case is they need to be able to read chemical labels, right? So that is just, that is relatively straightforward to do. But then their outputs is where it kind of gets tricky. So they need them in certain report formats, and they need certain things flagged. So that's a particular industry that we would work with somebody in that industry to co-develop, co-design a version of the software for them. They would sell it to their market and we would get, you know, a license share. So really how we take that product to market is different. So essentially what we've built is a backend that can handle unlimited numbers of white labels. The inputs are always the same, the outputs are different, but in the center, is the same core system.

22:53 Speaker B: Do you think that maybe perhaps rather than being a backend, it's a middle end? It's a—

23:00 Alan Jones: Infrastructure.

23:02 Speaker B: A mid-layer? Yeah, yeah. A middleware?

23:05 Alan Jones: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have a very large potential customer that we've signed a contract with in the financial services sector. Our brand wouldn't be visible anywhere layer in their deployment, right? It would be a complete white label. So yes, essentially where we want to be is that infrastructure layer. We want to be the trusted source of verified video, be that for compliance or for content.

23:32 Speaker B: Well, that, you know, I think that helps with the story. 'Cause I think a challenge when pitching startups to Australian startup investors, we touched already before about how valuation's more conservative here and rounds are typically smaller and so So it's a bigger ask here. But I think another potential challenge is that Australian investors don't get very many opportunities to invest in infrastructure plays. Most of what we do most of the time is in customer-facing, whether the customer is a consumer or a business or an enterprise, it's still, it's actually, it's got our logo on it and you know when you're using Canva, you know when you're using Jira, you know when you're using SafetyCulture. what you're using, right? The few exceptions there is there have been a few successful Aussie startups in software development, you know, people assisting with deploying applications in the cloud or managing cloud infrastructure. There's been a few successful cases there, but most of us don't get to operate much in middleware or in infrastructure. So I think I think coming out upfront and making it clear that that is what this is might be a good way forward. So we're selling something that has very broad application across a wide range of enterprise, media, consumer-facing, public service and government service operations, but you're never going to see the Vloggi brand or what's being delivered unless you're a software engineer working for one of those organizations.

25:10 Alan Jones: That's really useful. And this, you know, the title of this show is Pick Your Brains. And I have picked your brains before, but one of the challenges that I face now is— Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, culture, benefits, and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's d-e-e-l.com/dayone. A lot of people in the Australian investment scene know either me or know the brand. They know that video's content story. So what they don't know is what we've been doing for the past year, which is essentially building that infrastructure tool. And so they'll either email back like, "Nope, we looked at this 4 years ago, weren't interested," you know, or you get talking and then like you did actually at the beginning of the show, you put the website and the website, because that is still a working funnel for customers, needs to reflect that story of video as content. Whereas actually—

26:29 Speaker B: Yeah.

26:31 Alan Jones: Vlogitech.com, you know, tells a different story. So how would you go about that positioning, that pivot of, sure, we may have started here, but actually we see the much higher value over here?

26:43 Speaker B: Yeah, so there are no easy answers to this question, at least not until you've got a name brand investor signed into the round, right? Because then you can say to an investor who hasn't committed yet, you can say, well, Well, so-and-so are already in. Why don't you, you know, if you're not sure how this is different to what we pitched you a year ago, how about you check in with them and see why they've committed this time around? But that's, you know, not something that we can do until we have one of those name brand investors on board. What we might be able to do in the meantime is create a bit of an air gap between what investors think that they know Vloggy is and what we're doing now. Video as data. And one way to create that air gap is to have Vloggy become the name of a product in a suite of products. And another way to do that is just to rebrand, is just to, you know, you're still the founder and it's a video-related business, but this is a different startup that you're investing in with a different brand. So you can be Atlassian and have Jira and Confluence, all that kind of thing. So you can have a new holding company that investors are investing in and they perceive that you've got the old vloggy, but you've got another product as well. Or you can just say, no, we're just still one company, one product name, but it's, but it's new, it's different. So that's difficult because it incurs, you know, additional brand marketing expense and changing all your pitch templates and getting new t-shirts made, new merchandise. Um, but, um, it, it, it is probably the, the shortest path. Yeah. To helping investors understand that this is not what they remember from the last time you pitched.

28:31 Alan Jones: Yeah, no, that's interesting. I was actually speaking to a US investor the other day who kind of said the opposite. I mean, he, 'cause I said, oh, we had this pitch deck and we're talking about Vidproof, which is what we're talking, what we're calling the video as data product. And he was like, yeah, but the way I see it, people start as video as content and then you get talking to their team and they realize they could deploy it within their workforce as data and then legal get involved and then it gets to video as evidence. So, you know, the whole thing should be a continuum. But he was thinking big picture. I mean, it's funny. He was like, man, you've got everything we're looking for. Existing product in market, big names. Why are people not investing in you? Because it does have some recognition in the market and it is pulling in big names even though, I mean, we've turned away more big names than we've landed. NRMA needed SOC 2 compliance, Bolt Car Share, that was going to be a beauty. That was going to be 14 countries, again, starting with video as content from their employees, but then they actually talked about, could we use this to actually collect data from riders at the end of their system?

29:46 Speaker B: Yeah.

29:46 Alan Jones: So they were already thinking that way. Um, but because we weren't SOC 2 compliant, it fell apart. So I, I get your point and we do have this other brand, uh, Vidproof, um, and Video Vault. So we do kind of have some of these other brands, but some investors said that is more confusing to have multiple brands on one pitch deck.

30:06 Speaker B: It's going to be confusing for people that aren't already familiar with Flocky, you know? So like if you, if you, if you're pitching a, a US investor that isn't already Familiar with the company. They don't have a problem with, you know, they're not going to write you off because they heard about you 3 years ago. They could be open because they've never heard about you before. But if we're talking about addressing the problem of Australian investors, all of whom you've pitched to over the past 4 years, then maybe the way to solve that problem is for them to have some rebrand exercise so they do appreciate that this is a different company now. Another way forward, but again, not a simple solution. Is to make somebody else the point person on the investment pitch because startup investing is very much about the people, right? So we make a call on what we think the total addressable market is. We make a call on how innovative and potentially better solution the startup solution is going to be. And then it's, do we back the people behind this, right? So every startup investment opportunity, a big chunk of it, I would say for most investors, 70, 80% of it is who's behind it. Sometimes it could just help to have the point person on the initial pitch be somebody else that hasn't received this pitch from investors before. That could be a member of an advisory board or a director of the firm or somebody that you just hire for the purposes of raising this capital on a modest retainer and success fee basis.

31:34 Alan Jones: Yeah, we did actually, we appointed a corporate advisor. To do exactly that end of last year. And he got some reasonable leads, but none of them converted. I mean, that run into the Christmas sort of period. I was doing quite a bit of talking to angels and stuff before Christmas. That ran into that sort of period. And he basically took our pitch deck and then rewrote it and he wrote his own sort of version Yeah, we could use him again.

32:07 Speaker B: Yeah, or someone different. You know, like I went to the chiropractor yesterday and I've been seeing a chiropractor since I was young and talking to a friend at dinner last night, you know, they said, "Oh no, I don't like chiropractors. I went to one once, it didn't help." It's like, dude, you realize that there's good chiropractors and bad chiropractors, right? So, you know, or people will say to me, you know, "I've tried LinkedIn advertising and it didn't work." And if I dig down, I'll find out that they ran one creative with one targeting and spent one budget on it and decided they didn't like the results. And so for them, LinkedIn advertising doesn't work. So we can have somebody represent our company and have a good or bad experience. It sounds like maybe raising towards the end of the calendar year in Australia is always going to be tough because investors are always thinking about, I don't want to make big decisions and write large checks just before I take the family away for a Christmas holiday. I'll get back to this when I get back from break. So So there may have been some element of seasonality in their success or lack of success. But also there are other people out there in the market and you may find somebody with a better set of connections or somebody that just seems to do a better job of pitching this. We've always got to A/B test our experiments. We can't just one run without a control.

33:24 Alan Jones: Yeah. And then the other thing I was going to ask you was, again, conflicting views on whether the pitch deck should be visual because you're presenting it. Or what I find is most Australian investors, they just want to see a PDF of the pitch deck. You know, that is what they make their initial decision on, which means that it needs to have quite a bit of information in that pitch deck.

33:51 Speaker B: Everybody's different and it can sometimes be helpful to ask an investor what they'd like to see first. And usually they will say, I would like to see a deck first, but they won't really specify what should be and not be in that deck. So it can be pretty tough, but my personal preference, and I think what works for a lot of Australian investors, is to use a teaser deck upfront. So not all the information, not a huge amount of reading, but just some hints at tremendous commercial potential, tremendous commercial value. And all they have to do to join those dots and understand how is to schedule a video call with you or jump in on a coffee And then you can have a conversation person to person, which is always a better way for someone to build trust and confidence in you as a founder and in the business idea. And then you can follow up that initial conversation with, here's the meaty deck with all the footnotes and appendices and how we arrived at this commercial model and what we think the total addressable market is in real terms rather than just a high-level Venn diagram. So I think that works a lot of the time, but by no means all of the time. And I do think now, you know, with AI being applied to all sorts of funnel processes where there's a lot of information on the top, I do think we are starting to see a lot of investors say, sure, everything that you have, 'cause I'm just going to use an AI to ingest it all and give me a summary and give it a score out of 100 and tell me whether or not I should agree to have a coffee with you.

35:27 Alan Jones: Yeah, right.

35:29 Speaker B: It, it may be worthwhile, um, sending a whole deck out to somebody, um, or testing that with 3, 4, or 5, uh, investor leads, you know, so, so, so not your best leads, but, but just a representative sample of the rest of them and see if that big deck gets you no response at all, or if that big deck gets you, um, no thanks, we're going to pass. If you do get some introduction from that, it might be worth just leading with the BDEC.

35:58 Alan Jones: That's an answer which could go either way, isn't it?

36:03 Speaker B: Yeah, well, there's no such thing as a guaranteed solution, or it wouldn't be the startup industry if we knew how to do this, right? Everything's always an experiment. The challenge is in finding ways to execute the experiment quickly enough and cheaply enough that we manage to survive as a business.

36:21 Alan Jones: So if you were to replay, and I know that you're leading this interview, but if you were to replay back to me how you would pitch the business currently called Vloggy, but could be called whatever, how would you do it?

36:36 Speaker B: Yeah, I think kind of where you started was a really interesting way to pitch it today. I'm not a huge fan of video as data. Because I think you have to unpack a lot before somebody goes, hmm, I get what you mean. So you could maybe name check at the beginning of the pitch, or you could just use that as in summary. We see video as data and that's where its true commercial value lies. But I think where you started was, you know, we all believed, you know, until recently that we could trust what we see with our own eyes, you know? And now in a world of AI, The very thing that we used to think that we could trust the most, what we see with our own eyes when we see a still photo on a webpage or whether we see a video, can no longer be trusted. If it's not already 100% fakeable, it very soon will be.

37:28 Alan Jones: 71% of people do not trust video anymore according to Adobe survey came out in January. This US investor actually, I got to be careful because we We had one of the major airlines in Australia as a customer, and they've come back to us recently. And again, they were using it as video as content for employees. They came back to us just last week and said, "Actually, could we use your tool to get ad hoc inspection from remote airports?" So, not critical stuff, not anything where you needed a licensed engineer, but some ad hoc stuff where—

38:09 Speaker B: Yeah.

38:09 Alan Jones: There's tape on the ground or there's something, you know, some anomalies that they need to get back to base, could they use our tool to the engineers or ground crew just walk around and talk and record those incidents? And I said, "Yeah, absolutely." And they said, "Look, we're very slow to deal with, but we do now have this pilot program where we look for new innovation." And that's kind of why they reached out to us. And it was good because they were a paying customer, and they might be again. The US investor, he said, look, you should basically use that as a story to lead in with. I said, yeah, but we can't name the airline. But is that the sort of thing you think to frame it in someone's mind?

38:52 Speaker B: It's often a good idea to give somebody a concrete real example of how the product can be used and then go broad from that and say, but please don't think of us as a company that's helping airlines do infrastructure inspections, right? Right, because that's just one example of what we do. What we actually are is a middleware layer so that people who are relying on video content for regulatory, legal, insurance risk, et cetera purposes can trust that what's been uploaded is real and can be used later in evidence in trial, you know, as part of an insurance claim, et cetera. It's probably a good idea to start with one vertical example, but then to go straight to, don't think of us as a company that does this for that, because we are a middleware layer and the true application for what we do is vast across all industries, across government, across media.

39:50 Alan Jones: Yeah, no thanks. But the latest deck does do some of that.

39:56 Speaker B: Cool, cool, great. I think the way you pitch the business and the journey along the way, you come across very credible, very knowledgeable, very experienced. I love that you talk about how you built that first version yourself and taught yourself enough Typeform hacking and enough PHP hacking to make further progress. I think all investors feel like they want to back people who are just so determined to solve this problem that they will build it themselves, kind of, if they have to, right? So I think that's a really helpful part of the story too that didn't come out until we got into questions. And of course the other part of the of the story is Yuman Jaycee and holding the patent on—

40:38 Alan Jones: Who just called, in fact.

40:39 Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I think that's an important part of the story to weave in there. So we often talk about we as a startup, and investors don't ask often enough, well, like, who is we? Is this the royal we? Me, Justin, the self-taught PHP hacker, or are there other?

40:53 Alan Jones: I mean, Jean-Christophe Jaycee, he's very much enterprise software, very much the big end of town. That's where he's come from. So really, He's the person who's built an enterprise version of the software, you know. And when you asked about technical details earlier, I don't know a lot of the technical stuff that he talks about because it's all the stuff that big, big companies need because that's the world that he's from.

41:21 Speaker B: Cool. Mate, we should probably let our listeners and viewers get along with their day. So, Look, thanks Justin for telling us all about Vloggy and about video for data and for joining me today.

41:34 Alan Jones: Thank you.

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